Volunteers in Alabama restoring historic black cemetery

Families couldn't find their loved ones. Graves were vandalized. Headstones were in the wrong places. Bodies were buried on top of each other. Bones were sticking out of the dirt. And many graves were completely unmarked — with no cemetery records.

Open graves with broken headstones and exposed human remains, along with overgrown grass and weeds, made the cemetery a hazard.

"It's the worst situation I've ever seen in any cemetery," said Phillip Taunton, the sexton of Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery and a volunteer who has helped restore and maintain Lincoln Cemetery. "It's just so sad."

Oakwood Cemetery is a historic cemetery that was once a private enterprise but is now being run by the city of Montgomery.

The historic African-American Lincoln Cemetery, located adjacent to Lincoln and Harrison roads in Montgomery, had been abandoned for decades. Up until 2010, when a group of volunteers was charged by the city to restore, preserve and beautify the cemetery, it was nothing more than an eyesore that was ignored.

Taunton, who is chairman of the Lincoln Cemetery Rehabilitation Authority (LCRA), and the other volunteers have dedicated countless hours and thousands of dollars of their own money to improve conditions at the cemetery.

Today, because of the work of the authority and volunteer groups from the community, the cemetery actually looks like a cemetery. There's also now a database with more than 6,300 names of people believed to be buried at Lincoln.

Vital records, archived obituaries and the headstones at the cemetery are the only records of burials at Lincoln Cemetery. Up until recently, there were no centralized records.

Taunton said the city's engineering department found some old maps of the cemetery, but there were no records of names and dates of birth and death.

In 2008, volunteer Denise Hardin started putting together a list with names, dates of birth, dates of death and special notes documenting the cemetery's burials. A few years ago, she began an electronic database, and now, there are more than 6,300 names. The names include more than 2,400 who do not have any sort of grave marking — the identities of many of these had been lost through the years.

But Hardin wants to do more than identify a name.

"I want to know what happened to the people between the dashes," Hardin said. "These people, they lived. And I want to share that with other people. I don't want them to be a name with two dates."

In 1999 and 2002, the Montgomery Genealogical Society did a visual survey of the cemetery, and found that there were thousands buried on the property.

In 2010 and 2011, Hardin and Martha Phyllis Armstrong, another dedicated volunteer and member of the authority, did another visual survey and compared it to the previous ones. They took photographs of every grave marker at the cemetery and also marked where all the depressions in the ground were.

"If you take the two readings from 1999 and 2002 and compare them to the readings we've done in the last year or two, you can tell they've put people on top of unmarked graves," Hardin said.

Up until 2009 when the city implemented a cease-and-desist order, people were still being buried in the cemetery. Because there was no known owner or sexton at the time, burials were like free-for-alls, Hardin said.

"Nobody was there to say yes or no," Taunton said. "So they basically did whatever they wanted to."

Hardin said most of the burials didn't involve any sort of vault; they're just buried in the dirt. There are piles of headstones that were once on graves piled in the cemetery, as well as grave markers dropped in arbitrary locations.

Taunton said there are 50 to 70 people buried in each row, not including those buried under graves where you see headstones.

Originally designed for about 750 graves, the cemetery has more than 6,500 people buried on the 12-acre parcel of property.

Taunton said there are also hundreds buried across the cemetery's property line on the adjacent property of ABC's Montgomery affiliate, WNCF.

After the most recent grave documentation, Hardin started going through the Alabama Statewide Death Index, which includes records of all deaths from 1908 to 1974, alphabetically. She's also searched through archived obituaries to try to find information about anyone who may be buried there.

Since she started her research, more than 3,000 names have been added to the database. The database is a working list, and will probably never be complete, Hardin said.

Hardin said she is still in the process of searching the death index for more records. On her running tabulation lists, names are always being added and taken away, she said. Armstrong has put together hard copies of the records they have now.

"It means a lot to us because when we started working out here, we didn't have any records for Lincoln Cemetery," Taunton said.

He said he hopes making the database available will encourage the public to help fill in some of the missing information.

According to the database, there are 3,622 people without complete or accurate dates of birth or death. Of the 2,744 whose exact age at death is known, 326 of those are infants younger than 1.

There are also at least 26 individuals who served in the military, including 23 U.S. Army veterans, one U.S. Marines veteran and two who were in the U.S. Navy Reserves.

LCRA members — as well as their records — have helped countless people find their loved ones at the cemetery.

Taunton said people drive in from other states all the time trying to find graves, and many can't find them on their own. He said this is especially true with more recent burials.

"A lot of the families will contact the city, and the city will contact me because I'm the sexton at Oakwood Cemetery," Taunton said.

He said they're able to use the records to help families locate graves. But even they can't find some of them.

"People come here hunting for people buried here. We don't (always) know where they are, and they get upset with us," Armstrong said. "There have been so many illegal things done here. It's a disgrace."

A few months ago, Montgomery resident Sharnita Thomas needed help finding her mother, Beverly Johnson, who was buried at Lincoln in 2007.

Thomas said it took her family a while to find their mother because of the way the caskets looked. The name on the headstone was also spelled wrong.

"It's sad," Thomas said. "The maintenance is needed to make sure they're still loved even though they're not here. Everyone has to help, not just one person."

Thomas said she goes out to the cemetery around the holidays and on her mother's birthday. She said she cleans up around the grave, and will clean up some of the surrounding graves too.

"There are a lot of people out there; mothers and sisters and brothers," Thomas said. "They all need to rest in peace instead of people walking over them and not being able to see them."

But some families aren't so lucky.

Aurelia Shines Browder was a civil rights activist who was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus about seven months before Rosa Parks was arrested. She was one of five plaintiffs in Browder vs. Gayle, the U.S. Supreme Court case that lead to transportation desegregation in Montgomery.

Browder is buried at Lincoln, but no one's sure exactly where.

Donald Jenkins, a volunteer who has helped uncover Lincoln's history, said he found Browder's grave marker up against a tree and put it near the family plot.

"It's very unfortunate that all the people (buried) out there have been disrespected," Jenkins said.

Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne, who is known as Hank Williams' mentor, is also buried at the cemetery, Taunton said.

Because no one knows exactly where he's buried, there's a memorial marker at the entrance of the cemetery.

"There are so many notable people buried at Lincoln Cemetery," Taunton said.

Taunton said without other members of the authority, city crews and volunteers from the community, the cemetery would still be in disrepair.

Armstrong, Taunton, Hardin and LCRA members Darry Johnston are at the cemetery five or six days a week. Donald Bell and Sylvia Davison, also members, are at the cemetery whenever they can be as well.

"Most of the time, we're cutting the grass, mowing, trimming and cutting back tree limbs growing over the road," Taunton said.

They also rake and blow leaves and dirt off the graves, as well as re-set headstones, fill in open graves and repair vaults, headstones and graves when they can with donations.

"They don't have relatives out there," Jenkins said of the volunteers. "They just thought it was something that had to be done."

Every Saturday, members of the authority are out at the cemetery coordinating cleanup efforts from different groups in the community. Volunteers from Maxwell Air Force Base, Auburn Montgomery, Coca Cola, Mayer Electric Supply, Alabama Christian Academy and Loveless Academic Magnet Program High School are just some of the groups who have helped with the effort over the years.